If Orson Welles were still alive, he might now be preparing to film the bizarre story of Charles Keating-devout Catholic, loyal family man, daring real-estate developer and bank robber. A "Citizen Kane" for the 1990s.

Michael Binstein, an associate of journalist Jack Anderson, and Arizona free-lancer Charles Bowden don't offer pat explanations of Keating's character. Instead, they use court records and interviews with Keating and his friends and foes to describe in detail the world Keating created, then destroyed.

Many of their anecdotes came from people who don't dare speak about Keating on the record, even though the man is doing 10 years in a California prison. Still, his criminal record is there for all to see, a catalog of greed and corruption.

Like dozens of other financial wizards of the past decade, Keating realized that the deregulation of the savings and loan industry was essentially a license to steal. When S&Ls won the right to invest depositors' money in high-risk ventures, with the federal government guaranteeing to make up losses to depositors, it meant that S&L owners could invest in any smelly deal that hinted at a profit. If they were wrong, America's taxpayers were on the hook.

For Keating, a compulsive gambler who kept a craps table in his Phoenix home, the new rules meant he could break the bank. He went out, in fact, and bought a bank-Lincoln Savings & Loan in Los Angeles-and then broke it.

Through Lincoln, Keating lent himself hundreds of millions of dollars, in flagrant violation of such banking laws as still existed. He poured about $80 million of the money into Detroit's Pontchartrain Hotel, $300 million into a huge luxury hotel in Phoenix.

There were many more deals. There was the private air force-three jets and a helicopter-that whisked Keating to the world's most lavish resorts. And there were vast contributions to friendly politicians.

All of it was paid for by people who had simply wanted a safe place to deposit their savings. But at least the federal government will come up with the $2.5 billion those people lost. Thousands of others who put their life savings into uninsured junk bonds issued by Keating saw their money turn to wastepaper.

The mystery of Keating is in the contradictions. What can you make of a man who spends three days in a Yugoslavian peasant hut praying to the Virgin Mary, then hops into his corporate jet for a trip to the casinos of Monte Carlo?

We learn that Keating routinely called black people "niggers" and claimed that the San Francisco bank examiners who investigated Lincoln were homosexuals with a vendetta against him. Yet he was horrified when he learned that many people despised him.

There's a shocking or hilarious revelation about the world of Charles Keating on nearly every page of "Trust Me." He comes across as a man driven by urges that even he barely understood. But rather than work through his passions with a priest or psychologist, Keating unleashed them on the American economy, with disastrous results.

Maybe with all that prison time on his hands, Charles Keating will write a book and explain himself, something Charles Foster Kane never did. Until then, "Trust Me" will likely stand as the final word on this enigmatic swindler.